Introduction

against fate and ascription

pp. 1-21

in: Nicola Miller, Reinventing modernity in Latin America, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

The nations of Latin America were founded upon visions of modernity. Independence leaders imagined republics based on popular sovereignty and liberal freedoms blazing a trail through obscurantism and oppression toward a utopian future in which the full potential of humankind would be realized. Latin America would become distinctively, gloriously, hospitably modern, "disclosing to the Old World the majesty of the New," proclaimed Bolívar.² In practice, the notorious gap between ideals and realities in the region has meant that Latin America's modernity has indeed long been regarded as distinctive, but usually only in a negative sense. Peripheral, uneven, fractured, labyrinthine—these characteristic metaphors of deficiency all imply that the region's historical experience has been particularly prone to inauthenticity and inconsistency, even more so than might be anticipated by any general theory that the modern condition is generically at odds with itself: incomplete (Habermas), ambivalent (Bauman), or paradoxical (Berman).³ It is not unusual to find Latin America's history represented as a struggle between modernization and resistance to it.